In Records of Women (1828), a common theme within Felicia Hemans’s “Arabella Stuart” is the inspirational power love has for an individual’s endurance and preservation despite institutional pressures and prescriptive domestic obligations. Ironically, though, her work was used as a regulating mechanism in that she founds sources of inspiration in a deep national heritage and contributed to the production and recovery of English national identity, drawing from England’s cultural and literary heritage. On the other hand, when “Arabella Stuart” is pitted against “Joan of Arc, in Rheims,” which entails the loss of immersion in domestic love, one may deduce that Hemans’s concerns lay with the transcendent power of love, as the domestic sphere isn’t treated as limiting and confining but as a balm for temporary repose. Although there is much debate in academic atmospheres on the value of studying her work—what readers take from her texts—she achieved literary celebrity status during her lifetime and was lauded by many renowned Romantics, including Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, which indubitably reflects a mass readership. It seems like she lived before her time, and her artistic performances within “Arabella Stuart” and “Joan of Arc, in Rheims” speak to this sentiment in that she executes a task that seeks to recover, reimagine and revise—through imagination and creation— critically-erased female voices within history; it is a conscious, oppositional artistic performance, an act of rewriting history.
Although “Arabella Stuart” and “Joan of Arc, in Rheims” should not be seen as historical “fact,” Hemans performs a re-imagining of the psychological states of Lady Arabella Stuart and Joan of Arc in an effort to reclaim and revise the common motif of forefronting the image of the “mad” woman in historical accounts. For example, she writes of Lady Stuart, “[T]hat she finally lost her reason, and, if the duration of her imprisonment was short, that it was only terminated by her death” (8). In the way she constructs a narrative counter to this held belief of Lady Stuart, Hemans indubitably exposes how history and literature are alike, that history is a fabricated narrative that is embedded with political power. In prose, Hemans first discusses how Lady Stuart was in the line of succession to the English throne, which threatened James I’s claim to it, but one aspect Hemans makes clear is that she had no ambition to the throne. Her only crime was defying James I’s demand that she not marry William Seymour. Though she was, by right, entitled to the line of succession, she defied James I in the pursuit of love, and Hemans depicts her in a way that illustrates her moral superiority with her will to indulge her natural inclinations to love, not material desires, and this representation takes on a didactic function in appealing to her transatlantic audiences. In Hemans’ re-imagining of this historical figure, it is through this love that Lady Stuart is capable of relieving her pain and suffering, that she transcends the material world and creates a harmony between mind and body, a representation similar to the themes found within “Joan of Arc, in Rheims.”
Amidst the enthusiasm of her countrymen for their victories over the English, Joan of Arc seems to maintain a rigidly pious, chivalrous appearance—that is, until she is in the presence of her family. When she sees her father and brothers, her thoughts return her to a place of peace: “to the Fairy’s fountain in the glade, / Where her young sisters by her side had play’d, / And to her hamlet’s chapel, where it rose / Hallowing the forest until deep repose, / Her spirit turned” (74-78). She sacrifices her desires to experience and be immersed in domestic, familial love because of the duty to her country and the dependence of her countrymen on her divine leadership. The poem takes on an elegiac tone because she is restricted from this experience, and this theme is contingent with “Arabella Stuart” in that the hope of experiencing that domestic love again is a source of strength.
In the first-person narration of the piece, Lady Stuart expresses how this love is not earthly but of divine decree: “I sit and dream / Of summer-lands afar, where holy love, / Under the vine, or in the citron grove, / May breathe from terror” (85-88). She does not seek to covet this love but imagines “heaven’s breath around” (121) her beloved. She expresses how these selfless thoughts give her hope and provide sensations of transcendence from the material bonds and shackles of human greed constructed by such institutions she resists. At one point, she describes the irony of being royalty but that that “blood of kings” (155) is the cause both of her incarceration and her sense of melancholy, as she suggests that these institutional pressures and beliefs deprive her of the only source of happiness “of earth above” (256). In this earthly despair, she submits to death to transcend these power relations and to experience the divine, and in experiencing what she perhaps describes as a beautiful death—of confronting the sublime—it is a last act of defiance, a refusal to be docile.
Although “Arabella Stuart” and “Joan of Arc, in Rheims” should not be seen as historical “fact,” Hemans performs a re-imagining of the psychological states of Lady Arabella Stuart and Joan of Arc in an effort to reclaim and revise the common motif of forefronting the image of the “mad” woman in historical accounts. For example, she writes of Lady Stuart, “[T]hat she finally lost her reason, and, if the duration of her imprisonment was short, that it was only terminated by her death” (8). In the way she constructs a narrative counter to this held belief of Lady Stuart, Hemans indubitably exposes how history and literature are alike, that history is a fabricated narrative that is embedded with political power. In prose, Hemans first discusses how Lady Stuart was in the line of succession to the English throne, which threatened James I’s claim to it, but one aspect Hemans makes clear is that she had no ambition to the throne. Her only crime was defying James I’s demand that she not marry William Seymour. Though she was, by right, entitled to the line of succession, she defied James I in the pursuit of love, and Hemans depicts her in a way that illustrates her moral superiority with her will to indulge her natural inclinations to love, not material desires, and this representation takes on a didactic function in appealing to her transatlantic audiences. In Hemans’ re-imagining of this historical figure, it is through this love that Lady Stuart is capable of relieving her pain and suffering, that she transcends the material world and creates a harmony between mind and body, a representation similar to the themes found within “Joan of Arc, in Rheims.”
Amidst the enthusiasm of her countrymen for their victories over the English, Joan of Arc seems to maintain a rigidly pious, chivalrous appearance—that is, until she is in the presence of her family. When she sees her father and brothers, her thoughts return her to a place of peace: “to the Fairy’s fountain in the glade, / Where her young sisters by her side had play’d, / And to her hamlet’s chapel, where it rose / Hallowing the forest until deep repose, / Her spirit turned” (74-78). She sacrifices her desires to experience and be immersed in domestic, familial love because of the duty to her country and the dependence of her countrymen on her divine leadership. The poem takes on an elegiac tone because she is restricted from this experience, and this theme is contingent with “Arabella Stuart” in that the hope of experiencing that domestic love again is a source of strength.
In the first-person narration of the piece, Lady Stuart expresses how this love is not earthly but of divine decree: “I sit and dream / Of summer-lands afar, where holy love, / Under the vine, or in the citron grove, / May breathe from terror” (85-88). She does not seek to covet this love but imagines “heaven’s breath around” (121) her beloved. She expresses how these selfless thoughts give her hope and provide sensations of transcendence from the material bonds and shackles of human greed constructed by such institutions she resists. At one point, she describes the irony of being royalty but that that “blood of kings” (155) is the cause both of her incarceration and her sense of melancholy, as she suggests that these institutional pressures and beliefs deprive her of the only source of happiness “of earth above” (256). In this earthly despair, she submits to death to transcend these power relations and to experience the divine, and in experiencing what she perhaps describes as a beautiful death—of confronting the sublime—it is a last act of defiance, a refusal to be docile.